Aleksander Drabinko, a metropolitan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate in a city of Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, announced himself a clergyman of the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate.

Drabinko who had been repeatedly accused of pedophilia, homosexuality, and abduction activities, stated that he became a clergyman of the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate, reports Hromadske.TV, an Internet television station in Ukraine.

It is known that in 2016, Drabinko was a participator in crime related to abduction of a nun and her lay sister from the Svyato Pokrovsky convent. Moreover, he had been repeatedly suspected of swindling.

And more importantly, Drabinko was featured in European journalists’ articles on Ukraine’s National Security Agency’s attempts to recruit ecclesiastics. It was noted that he had started cooperating with Ukraine’s policy elite after he was caught engaging in homosexual and pedophilic relationship.

In retaliation, the Russian Orthodox Church came to decision to sever relations with the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate. Bartholomew and the synod members illegally lifted the anathema from a dissenter patriarch Philaret, and announced the commence of a procedure related to providing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with autocephaly, thereby bypassing the Russian Orthodox Church.

From October 13 to 15, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Rus’ and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church held the ROC synod meeting outside Russia for the first time, following the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate’s assessment of actions in Ukraine, as well as devising response strategies by ROC.

The meeting took place thanks to the attitude of the Belarus’ leader Aleksander Lukashenko.

In September, the synod of the Belarus Orthodox Church backed the Russian Orthodox Church’s attitude as to appointing two exarches in Kyiv, and voiced its protest against interfering of one local church into internal matters of another local church.

The synod supported the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate Onuphrius, and emphasized an inseparable moral integrity of Orthodox Christians of friendly nations in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.